You've been there, at the Powell's Lite at PDX. You only have a few minutes before tackling security. You're not asking for all that much, just a story that will make you forget the carry-on instructions, the middle seat, the inanity of the in-flight movie.

On Friday, I took my lead from the Pulitzer Prize jury, and picked up the 2010 award-winner in Fiction, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. With some trepidation, given a back-cover blurb that suggested Egan was poised to introduce me to another collection of self-absorbed New York twits.

It took a few minutes and one pass down the aisle of the drink cart. It took 40 pages, whereupon -- in a chapter entitled "Ask Me if I Care" -- Egan makes the first in a series of back-breaking, time-bending, plot-rattling shifts in point of view that sucked me into her novel ... and, finally, into her fan club.

Two days after finishing A Visit from the Goon Squad, I'm still trying to figure out how Egan assembled this amazing novel. Yes, the cover-blurb debutantes -- Bennie, the "aging form punk rocker," and Sasha, "the passionate, troubled young woman he employs" -- are at the heart of the cast, but their travails don't begin to describe the places Egan is willing to go to flesh out the ways we find to hurt, and heal, one another.

In that daunting third chapter, Egan suddenly leaves Bennie and Sasha in the dust and dives into the heart and soul of a teenager girl watching Bennie fumble with his bass in his 1979 seminal band. Rhea is awash in freckles and aghast that her best friend, Jocelyn, with whom she's done everything since the fourth grade, got picked up hitchhiking by Lou the record producer in the red Mercedes: "He unscrewed the bottom of a can of Right Guard, and a Baggie of cocaine dropped out. Lou did some lines off Jocelyn's bare butt and they went all the way twice ... I made Jocelyn repeat each detail of this story until I knew everything she knew, so we could be equal again."

As you struggle to catch up, Egan takes another wild tack and we land near Mombasa where Lou is on safari with some band members, the children from his failed marriages and Mindy, the grad student he will soon marry out of spite. Blink again, and we are in the company of Kitty Jackson, the washed-out teen-age movie star, and a genocidal African dictator who needs some good, old-fashioned PR.

I can't begin to explain how this all fits together. I'm still struggling to understand how Egan manages to deftly circle back -- adjusting the tempo and the narrative voice -- to connect the burn-outs, the survivors and the dots.

But I know this: I remember every damaged soul in her book, and not a minute of that sullen United flight.